Le Fresnoy

In 2017, in Portugal, devastating wildfires destroyed forests and killed children and adults; some died in their villages, others were trapped on a road. Communication failed, and the villages had no shelters. The film’s action does not take place in 2017, but at a later time. It follows a small group of people who lost their dearest ones and are now in the process of learning how to live after everything they have lost.

After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, many people in Russia faced a brutal choice: prison, the army – or exile. Margarita, Yuri and their friends are caught in the crosscurrents of history, with no way to return home, but also no place where they feel truly welcome.

This film was shot between 2014 and 2019 in the town of Zhili, a district of Huzhou City in Zhejiang province, China. Zhili is home to over 18,000 privately-run workshops producing children's clothes, mostly for the domestic market, but some also for export. The workshops employ around 300,000 migrant workers, chiefly from the rural provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou, Anhui, Jiangxi, Henan and Jiangsu.

Stranded along a sublime river fjord in northern Portugal, an ornithologist is subjected to a series of brutal and erotic Stations-of-the-Cross-style tests.

After a bad breakup, a college-aged Parisian moves into her father's flat only to discover that he is living with his new girlfriend - a young woman her age.

Wang Xilin, 86, is one of China's most important modern classical composers. During the Cultural Revolution he was the target of severe persecution, enduring beatings, imprisonment and torture. With excerpts from his Symphonies, he revisits for this film some of the horrifying events that still live on in his memory as testimony to an era that saw the dehumanization of the entire Chinese nation.

A home-guard serviceman assigned the task of standing watch over a barren no-man's-land begins to experience an existential crisis after years of lonely service.

“RAPTURE II - PORTAL" revolves around Ukrainian Vogue dancer Marko and the confrontation with his abandoned apartment in the region of Donbas, where the war is going on for ten years. It fuses the idea of a physical lost home and the body of a dancer as an infinite eternal home. The film is contextualized by the self-commented tour of Marko, structured as a hypnosis session.

"RAPTURE I - VISIT" revolves around Ukrainian Vogue dancer Marko and the confrontation with his abandoned and inaccessible apartment in the region of Donbas, Ukraine, where the war is going on for ten years. This apartment, rendered through a 3D scan of original photographs, becomes a digital reconquest of territory as Marko visits it through VR for the first time since 2018. He cannot return to Ukraine or Donbas (now Russia) due to the ongoing war caused by Russia's aggressive full-scale invasion. To inherit the apartment Marko needs to enter the country of Russia, where he immediately will be conscripted and forced to go to war to fight against his own country Ukraine.

Three siblings comprise the latest generation in a family of puppeteers led with passion by their father. They are magicians of a kind, but can barely make ends meet, working mainly for the love of their craft. Their grandmother contributes too, not only as a seamstress but also as a repository of memories and wisdom. A tragic event will challenge the desire of each sibling to carry on.

André Demester secretly and painfully loves Barbe, his childhood friend, accepting from her the little that she gives him. He leaves home to be a soldier in a war in a far off land. Barbarity, camaraderie and fear turn him into a warrior. As the seasons go by, Barbe, alone and wasting away, waits for the soldiers to return. Will Demester’s boundless love for Barbe save him?

Island of La Réunion, in the beginning of the 20th century. Five teenagers commit a savage crime. As punishment, a Dutch captain takes them to a supernatural island with luxuriant vegetation and bewitching powers.

The mood is heated. Demonstrations are taking place across France, also in front of the Paris hotel where an Italian named Giorgio is booking the bridal suite for him and his boyfriend Antonio. Hotel manager Diana doesn’t trust them and calls the police to get rid of the odd couple. Italians? Homosexuals? Criminals? In the charged atmosphere of the Hotel Occidental, little is needed for initial suspicions to be aroused.

In his meetings with various different people, Jean-Luc Godard develops his thinking about history, politics, the cinema, images and time, and this will lead to his exhibition as an artist at the Pompidou Centre. Jean-Luc Godard’s conversations with Dominique Païni, Jean Narboni, André S. Labarthe, Jean-Marie Straub, Danielle Huillet and Christophe Kantcheff were filmed at his home in Rolle, in his study, at the Fresnoy National Studio for the Contemporary Arts (in front of students) and in the exhibition rooms of the Pompidou Centre.

Mariel wants to play Isabella in Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure”. With the support of Luciana, who is also an actress, she has already rehearsed the part. But during the audition, Mariel realises that Luciana is trying out for the same role.

In 2004 Wim Vandekeybus shot a 52-minute feature based on his successful performance Blush. Carried by the music of David Eugene Edwards and Woven Hand and with texts by the Flemish author Peter Verhelst, Blush is a dazzling voyage swinging between the heavenly landscapes of Corsica and the slummiest depths of Brussels. It is an exploration of the savage subconscious, of mythical forests, of conflicting instincts, of imagination, where the body has reasons unknown to the mind. In dance sequences of attraction, confrontation and repulsion the performers take on animal metamorphoses…

The young man fell from the sky. Communication relay burns. Flee from the city and its commotion, return to nature. Become part of another story. That of the legend of the prince. In the hope of a love, hiding behind the hollow in a tree. Nothing magic is improbable. What happened yesterday, may happen again tomorrow.

With two actors and no sets, master filmmaker Claire Denis traces the arc of a strained relationship, with a focus on race and language. In this fraught arena, words omitted can be as potentially devastating as words used, and what is not seen can have greater political consequences than what is.

A young woman wandering around meets a young man going to a casting call for a pornographic film.

A visit to the Louvre in Paris commentated by an actor reading Cézanne.